The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Written by Mohsin Hamid
Harcourt, 2007
Mohsin Hamid’s story is set up as a story within a story. His main character, Changez, is sitting at a table with a silent American stranger (who is never revealed) outside of a café in Lahore, Pakistan recounting his former life in America. The main plot line is Changez’s struggle of being torn between two countries and two lifestyles. Sometime after the beginning of the “War On Terror,” he begins to see America from all angles. It is a land that helps many natives and immigrants reach their dreams, but Changez starts to realize this land that he held in such high regard upon arrival is not only the world’s superpower, but a bully as well.
Surprisingly, I found the most “suspenseful” points of the book existed between Changez and his love interest, Erica. The struggle to acquire her love was constant and compelling. She overtook him, feeding him with a seemingly unquenchable need for her. I was hopeful for these two, but it had already been revealed at the opening of the story that the relationship had failed for an unknown reason at the time. It is soon discovered that Erica has more affection for her deceased boyfriend, Chris, than Changez. Sadly, Changez doesn’t see the incessant conversations they have about Chris as a red flag. In one scene, the two are in his New York flat attempting to have sex for the second time. Erica is having trouble getting comfortable with his body and her own, when Changez on a whim proposes that it might make her feel more relaxed and aroused if she could just imagine that she is with Chris. In taking on the persona of Chris, he causes more damage to her fragile reality. After the momentary satisfaction of being with the woman he loves, he feels grave shame for giving up his identity for a dead man just to feed his desire to be with her. At this point in the book, Changez becomes more interesting and real.
The meat of the book is not very edge of your seat, but it is well-planned and put to the page as if Hamid calculated each word’s individual purpose. But, I am afraid the book ended the same way it began — with the American stranger being silent. The scenes involving the stranger only becomes more contrived as the book progressed and Changez answering his rhetorical questions is quite intolerable early on. And, however necessary the ending was for the author to get his message across, I felt it was nothing more than predictable.
